"We've got to draw a line under unethical behaviour," says one lawyer to another in an American cartoon strip. "But draw it in pencil."

Lawyers' ethics is a concept too easily mocked, but there is growing recognition that more needs to be done to ensure both would-be and qualified lawyers are certain of the standards they are required to uphold.

A report published by the Law Society last week said ethics should be added to the seven "foundations of legal knowledge" that are at the heart of the law degree, and it emerged that the Solicitors' Regulation Authority (SRA) is considering whether to make ethics a compulsory element of solicitors' ongoing post-qualification training . In both instances people might be surprised that these are not already happening.

The SRA's ethics helpline receives some 5,000 calls a month. My experience, having once sat in on it, is that solicitors are generally seeking reassurance they are doing the right thing rather than looking for ways around the rules. Nonetheless, there is a general fear, especially with the introduction of alternative business structures (ABSs) and the prospect of non-lawyers owning law firms, that some of the finer points of the lawyers' code of conduct may be discarded in the interests of commercial gain.

The potential for pressure from non-lawyer owners to act unethically has been one of the main arguments against ABSs. But government-commissioned research in 2005, by Paul Grout, professor of political economy at Bristol University, said this overlooked the fact that there would be little personal gain for the lawyer in acting unprofessionally and reasoned that where the lawyer has a larger ownership of the business, there is far more incentive to take the risk.

There is also an assumption that non-legal businesses do not operate ethically, or at least as ethically as lawyers. Given some of the events of recent years (miners' compensation scandal, anyone?), lawyers should be careful about throwing the first stone.

Last year, the Legal Services Board chief executive, Chris Kenny (a non-lawyer), recounted that the most "jaw-dropping comment" he had heard since being in the job was a lawyer who said his colleagues were more ethical than the general population "because we are trained in it".

Kenny said:

"I lose count of the ways in which that comment is both wrong-headed and deeply offensive. It is easily rebutted – let's just count how many degrees in moral philosophy Torquemada and his fellow inquisitors had – but it does highlight a real danger. Ethical training is all about giving practitioners a practical toolkit they can use to protect their own integrity and to build public trust. It's not about building a wall of professional exclusivity to protect moralising self-righteousness."

A solid grasp of ethics will become more important on 6 October, not just because that is when ABSs go live, but also because it is the day when the SRA plan for outcome-focused regulation is introduced. This will mean a shift from the present tick-box compliance with the rules to an emphasis on high-level principles and standard of service for clients. In future a solicitor's conduct will be judged against 10 core principles and what was delivered to the client, more than how it was done.

In more recognisable parlance, this is principles-based regulation, a term not used because it has been discredited by the Financial Services Authority. The SRA argues that failures in other areas can be attributed to how the principles were policed rather than any inherent flaw in the concept. Perhaps the greater worry is that many solicitors have yet to engage with the fact that their rulebook is changing so radically in eight months.

Ethics are by no means unique to lawyers but they are part of the suite of public protections they uniquely offer to society. Interestingly, the Law Society and Bar Council are joining a range of other professional bodies to launch Professions 4 Good, which will promote the value of professions in society.

Chairman Louis Armstrong says the "ethics, integrity and standards" exemplified by the professions "have become even more important during the recession". I've long felt that most of the problems in the legal profession in recent years can be boiled down to the tension between law as a profession and law as a business (legal aid is a good example), but actually this is too simplistic. Law is a professional – need I say ethical? – business. Or at least it should be.